During National Nurses week 2015, from May 6 – 12, we acknowledge and celebrate the excellence and dedication of those who choose the nursing profession. I grew up surrounded by nurses in a nursing home that my family owned and operated. The patients were mostly elderly people who had the usual physical and mental problems related to aging, but we lived in a rural area and my mother’s skills as a Registered Nurse also made her the go-to person for many emergencies around the village – cuts, burns and even broken bones, head injuries and emotional problems.
I can see my mother calmly cleaning and dressing a bloody wound caused by broken glass and, on another occasion, carefully positioning a child’s possibly broken leg after a fall from a tree. Eventually, a doctor might become involved, but watching my mother and her colleagues in action day after day offered me firsthand knowledge that nurses, always women in those days, were unsung heroines.
Nurses in war zones and military settings have done their job quietly and largely unnoticed as well, putting their lives in peril on the battlefield for centuries. Yet, little is known about their experiences in war or exactly how many participated. Even appropriate financial remuneration has been meager and long in coming. Only at the end of the twentieth century did nurses’ pay, both in military and civilian life, begin to become commensurate with the risks and responsibilities of their jobs.
Many women served as nurses during the Revolutionary War, but they are barely mentioned in history books. The Second Continental Congress, heeding George Washington’s advice […]

My mother was a great fan of Benjamin Franklin. She was an entrepreneur and self-starter herself and she spoke frequently about Ben’s many successes: publishing newspapers; establishing a subscription library and philosophical society; a fire company; a hospital; a militia; becoming postmaster of Philadelphia; proposing the University of Pennsylvania; performing electrical experiments (the lightning rod!) and on and on to signing the Declaration of Independence and enabling peace negotiations with France and Great Britain.
The first lesson: nothing hinders success more than lack of ideas.
She spoke about him so often that, as a child, I assumed we were relatives. I thought of my mother when I was honored with the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Award by the IBPA for my memoir, Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War. She died years before the book was born, but I felt her influence as I battled continuous rejections by publishers. Once the book was written, the idea of giving up on its publication became impossible. It was only a question of when. I don’t know exactly how my mother planted the seeds of industry and determination in her children, but she did, and I’m happy to be associated with any famous person she admired (although Mata Hari was pretty high on her list, too).
The second lesson: believe in yourself and your product – in my case, the story I wanted to tell.
Now, in the spirit of Ben, I’d better get on to my next project.

It was a muggy July evening in 1946 when five women, whose husbands had died in World War II, traveled to Hyde Park, New York, to meet with a soon to be war widow, Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt later wrote in her news column, My Day, “…they came for supper, and then went to Poughkeepsie the Lafayette Post of the American Legion had given them permission to use a room… It was a small meeting, though the casualties among servicemen from Dutchess County were pretty high.”
In fact, more than 175 men from Dutchess County alone were killed or MIA by 1945.
These five young widows had first met together in Marie Jordan’s apartment in New York City in 1945 to talk about how they might band together to support the needs of all war widows and their children. Losing a spouse in combat meant also losing medical care, commissary privileges and even their home if they lived in military housing. Most had married young and had no job training. They had little or no resources from the U.S. government and often relied on the charity of family and friends. Out of desperation they formed a support group called the American Widows of WWII.
Their appeal to Mrs. Roosevelt was auspicious. When FDR died in 1946, she counted herself among them and became one of the original signers of the group’s charter. The name was changed to Gold Star Wives of America in 1948 and the mission expanded to seek benefits for both the spouses and children of persons who died in war and as […]

Not long ago in a writing workshop, a colleague offered to read a personal essay I had written about a difficult life experience. My kind friend reported back that he felt as if I was dragging him, sad and depressed, to the abysmal end of the story. “I don’t want to feel as if I’m being forced to feel bad,” he said. “Where’s your sense of humor? And you’re not having any fun, either.”
Humor? I didn’t see anything funny about the story of my trip to Washington, DC, to see my husband’s name on the Vietnam Memorial for the first time – but – maybe I was taking myself a little too seriously. Perhaps Colette, the French writer whose husband locked her in a room to keep her writing, was right when she said that total absence of humor renders life impossible. Humor in nonfiction writing demands taking a firm, self-confident position about our “self” and then flipping the situation upside down. Writer Leigh Anne Jasheway calls this creative misdirection; engaging readers by taking them someplace they don’t expect to go, choosing words and metaphors that make readers giggle without knowing why. She says a smiling reader wants to read on even if the topic is inherently sad.
Where was my sense of comic relief? Obviously, I had forgotten that humor creates a bond with readers and cuts down on tension and anxiety. People need to cry and laugh. Humor fosters a sense of immediacy, a close personal connection. There was little to joke about in my essay, but there were some curious ironies that I hadn’t yet dug deeply enough to discover. As Dorothy Parker said in Writers at Work, “There’s […]

The Healing Journey of Grief

At a recent meeting with a book club discussing my memoir, Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War, one reader asked me if it is difficult today for me to look at pictures of my husband who was killed in Vietnam in 1969. It’s a great question because it brought back my memory of the many years during which it was difficult to look at anything that reminded me of him and our happiness. I remember putting out of sight anything that triggered my grief and the pain in my heart, even the book plates that he had placed in all our books, with an image of the little mermaid statue in Copenhagen, on which he wrote, “Dave and Ruth” was too much for me. I covered them up with the same bookplate, leaving the line where our names had been written blank.
And yet, today, I have written and published an entire book about him, our relationship, his death and the serendipitous meeting of his comrades who have regaled me with stories about him. In the process of writing I’ve looked at many photographs of him, many supplied by the guys who were with him in Vietnam. I see this young, handsome guy who I was deeply in love with, who I still feel the same love for, but I can look at him and not feel shaken. Is this the effects of time, age, natural healing? Does the heart grow scar tissue? I’m not sure.
In my memoir I wrote about learning from my mother’s example of putting things away after a death. When my youngest brother died at home after years of […]

I am grateful for a year of blessings. My book launch on May 17, 2014 was beyond my wildest dreams. More than 100 people came and crammed into Bank Square Books in Mystic, CT. Since then, the bookstore has sold more than 120 copies (not bad for a small town!) and I was honored to present my book to President Obama at the White House on Memorial Day. The book continues to be one of the top sellers on Amazon. I believe that the success of my book is related to the fact that many people need to hear and speak about those years during which the Vietnam War ravaged our spirits in this country. Because I am telling my story of how I became a widow at age 23 in 1969, and how I survived and eventually met, in 2006, the men who served with my husband, people are responding to me with their stories. I am honored to hear them. The power of stories and storytelling for healing is amazing. Bless this year, and all of you.
An excerpt from Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War:
“I like to think that a rough-cut wisdom sustained me through my earlier life when I arrived at the beginning of adulthood, met incomprehensible tragedy and thought I had nothing left to live for. Sorrow does leave footprints, but healing is the courage just to continue, to begin again and again – many times over. I’m still standing, still believing. Hope works from within, rebuilding, even when we feel hopeless. It […]

When I grew up in rural Connecticut in the 1950s, we attended church in Quakertown, an area in Ledyard founded by the Rogerene Quakers in the 17th century. The Quakers of that time were trying to escape persecution by the Congregationalists. Both of my parents had been born at home in Ledyard and were descendants of the Rogerenes. The church service had evolved since the early days and had become fundementalist, similiar to a Southern Baptist style.
The main event of every worship service was music and lots of “praising” as people stood up spontaneously to say, “Praise the Lord!” They would mention the sick and needy during the praising periods and ask for blessings. Some people were overtaken by the Holy Spirit and rolled on the floor in the aisle while speaking in tongues, a nonsensical language over which the speaker supposedly has no control. For me, it seemed like a curious explosion of adult emotion. Kids didn’t “know” this language but grownups appeared to feel better afterwards. When they recovered and got back in their pew, they would be smiling and perspiring. I’m not sure what anyone expected, but they seemed relieved.
At Christmastime there were trees laced with paper chains and ropes strung with cranberries and popcorn at the front of the church. Choirs and soloists sang carols and children performed pageants and memorized poems. My grandmother inscribed my poem on the back of an empty Christmas card box. She wrote it out in longhand and, because I couldn’t yet read at age four when I was assigned my first poem, she spoke […]

Since my book launch on May 17, 2014 I’ve experienced the joy of sharing conversations about my book with many book clubs and at schools and libraries. At a recent event at the Groton Public Library, several Vietnam Veterans were in the audience along with people who said they had protested the war back in the sixties. Everyone expressed a need to talk about that time and the long silence that followed. Telling our stories is a healing experience and I’m happy that my book, Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War, seems to resonate with so many and stimulate the joy of sharing and hearing each other’s memories about a difficult time in our nation’s history.
By talking about not just the bad times, but also the good times, people begin to feel more whole. Remembering the goodness of some people during dark days seems to trigger a greater sense of happiness in the brain. Writing about these experiences can also have profound healing effects. There are no rules. Write whenever you want and however you want. Only you know and can tell your story. And, hearing your story might help others to remember their’s.

I was deeply touched by the responses to a question I posed on Facebook recently when I asked for thoughts on why people become depressed (or more depressed) around the holidays and which holiday is the most challenging.
No one spoke about having to work on a holiday as a source of distress and no one mentioned cooking, but this was a limited sample.
A sense of loss was number one; loss of family members, traditions, and place (for those who have moved far away from what they call “home”), especially when the losses were irrevocable. Certain people in our lives seem to be beacons for how to celebrate and enjoy a holiday. One person described her deceased husband as loving Christmas so much that the tree kept getting bigger every year and they finally had to buy a bigger house. When he was gone, it was difficult to get into the spirit in the same way. Christmas is a time when we miss people the most. One person mentioned that her sadness since her husband’s death in Iraq is greater at Christmas because it reminds her that her children were too young to remember their father. He died when they were babies.
Right behind loss was the overwhelming sense of expectation; that holidays require being social and happy, buying gifts, buying the right gifts, accepting invitations, being as good as the media tells us we have to be, and accomplishing all this in a short period of time (if you haven’t been shopping all year!). December 26 is a day of enormous relief for many people. Maybe that’s the day the party should be held.
After expectations, a […]